Washington [403]
Washington took to heart his friends’ advice to do more exercise, which was one reason he made a trip to New England that fall. Upon his return, he and Martha, along with Nelly and Washy, began extended coach rides around Manhattan, often cruising a fourteen-mile loop that took them to the scenic northern reaches of the island. Even in the winter, Washington supplemented these excursions with strolls around the Battery. Sometimes he mixed in a smattering of politics, as happened in January when he went horseback riding with Senator Samuel Johnston of North Carolina and William Cushing, an associate justice of the Supreme Court—a perfect equestrian union of all three branches of government.
WASHINGTON’S ILLNESS coincided with the final stages of Mary Ball Washington’s protracted struggle with breast cancer. Showing belated maternal warmth, Mary had her daughter, Betty, write to the new president, apropos of his convalescence, that she “wishes to hear from you; she will not believe you are well till she has it from under your own hand.” 12 Mary had always been a hardy woman and, even as she aged, retained “full enjoyment of her mental faculties,” according to her famous son.13 Clinging to her independence, she still made daily visits to her farm in an open carriage, until illness rendered that impossible. When he visited his redoubtable mother in early March 1789, Washington knew he might never see her again and that it would be “the last act of personal duty I may . . . ever have it in my power to pay my mother.”14 It is significant that he employed the word duty, since affection had never formed part of the picture. Whatever she may have said privately, Mary Washington took no more public pride in his being president than she had in his command of the Continental Army. But it’s hard to imagine that on his last visit to his mother, Washington was unmoved by the sight of a dying parent, cruelly disfigured by disease, or that he felt no residual gratitude toward her. Whatever her glaring flaws, Mary Washington had worked hard to raise him in the absence of a father.
By mid-August Mary Ball Washington had drifted into a coma; she finally passed away on August 25, 1789, at eighty-one. On September 1 Washington was hosting a dinner party, with Steuben keeping the table in uproarious merriment, when the laughter was abruptly silenced by a message announcing her death. Despite his reservations about his mother, Washington was much too decorous to dispense with the proper forms of mourning. Always correct in his conduct toward his mother, he ordered black cockades and ribbons for his household staff, while government members wore black crape on their arms; black ribbons and necklaces became de rigueur for ladies. Official New York went into mourning for a woman whom they had never seen and who had shown scant interest in the new government. The formal levees were canceled for three weeks. Soon the capital resumed its normal social rhythm, but Washington wore badges of mourning for at least five months. In what seems like shocking neglect, however, he failed to erect a tombstone on his mother’s grave. “The grave of Washington’s mother is marked by no visible object, not even a mound of earth, nor is the